Are you sure that this failure is 100% correlated with the new driver? The failure in question is a call to malloc() - the system's memory allocation function. In 260.*, this is probably the very first allocation that VDPAU ever makes, whereas in earlier drivers, this allocation was made later during initialization. This implies that this particular allocation is more likely to work successfully in 260.* than earlier drivers, not less. This indicates that your system is running low on memory.